THE JOURNAL RADIOCARBON has a recent article on the Dead Sea Scrolls:

Are the 14C Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls Affected by Castor Oil Contamination?

Radiocarbon, 1 April 2002, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 213-216(4)

Carmi I.

Abstract:
The paper "The effects of possible contamination on the radiocarbon dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls I: castor oil" by Rasmussen et al. (2001) is discussed. Detailed analysis of the extant dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests that the pretreatment of the samples was adequate. Errors and omissions in the paper are discussed and the implications of the experiment of Rasmussen et al. (2001) are questioned.

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(Heads up, Stephen Goranson and S�ren Holst on g-Megillot.)

THE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2004 ISSUE (57.1) OF ARCHAEOLOGY MAGAZINE IS ONLINE, marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America. Articles of interest include:

"Albanian Synagogue Surfaces"

"Letter From Switzerland: Theme Park of the Gods"

"Building Trust in Iraq"
Manhattan assistant district attorney and Marine Corps colonel Matthew Bogdanos on tracking down the looted artifacts of the Iraq National Museum

Excerpt from the last:

What's still missing?
You have the public gallery from which originally forty exhibits were taken. We've recovered eleven. Turning to the storage rooms, there were about 3,150 pieces taken from those, and that's almost certainly by random and indiscriminant looters. Of those, we've recovered about 2,700. So there's about 400 of those pieces, excavated pieces, missing. The final group is from the basement. The basement is what we've been calling the inside job. And I will say it forever like a mantra; it is inconceivable to me that the basement was breached and the items stolen without an intimate insider's knowledge of the museum. From there about 10,000 pieces were taken. We've only recovered 650, approximately.

THE JOURNAL NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES has a new issue online (49.4). Note in particular the following article:

Of Cherubim and the Divine Throne: Rev 5.6 in Context

DARRELL D.�HANNAH

Abstract

This article seeks to establish that Rev 5.6, despite its imprecise language, situates Christ on the divine throne and not merely next to it or alongside it. That Christ shares the divine throne is clearly asserted elsewhere in the book of Revelation (3.21; 7.17; 22.1, 3). Since this is the case, and as the other ways in which John's language at 5.6 can be understood introduces a number of difficulties, it is probable that John also intended 5.6 to be another affirmation of Christ's enthronement on the one divine throne. This conclusion is confirmed when it is noticed that John envisioned the living creatures which surround the throne to be living, constituent parts of the divine throne itself. Christ is thus in the midst of the throne and in the midst of the living creatures because they, as components of the throne, are both a part of it and surround it. This has been argued by at least one earlier interpreter. It has not, however, been noted just how widespread or how early is the evidence for the living creatures or cherubim as both living and constituent parts of the heavenly divine throne. Archaeological evidence, as well as passages from 1 Enoch, the Song of the Three Young Men, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, Josephus, 2 Enoch, the Apocalypse of Abraham and On the Origin of the World are examined and shown to support such a conception of the divine throne and of the cherubim.

Requires paid personal or institutional subscription to access.

ACCORDING TO AN "UNNAMED SENIOR VATICAN OFFICIAL", the Pope liked Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

"It is as it was."

The quote has not been confirmed by the Vatican.

MORE ON THE "ABSALOM'S TOMB" INSCRIPTIONS from the Christian Science Monitor.

New find, old tomb, and peeks at early Christians

Excerpt:

Scholars differ over how significant the findings at "Absalom's Tomb" are. Professor [Gideon] Foerster says, "It fills a gap and gives us one more detail of what we know about that historical site. The fact that the name Zacharias is mentioned there shows us that Christians in the 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th century believed he was buried there. If you have a literary source, it's just a literary source. If you have an inscription this is real evidence."

Foerster discounts that Zacharias was buried at the site, saying that during the 1st century those monuments belonged to the Jewish priestly families of Jerusalem, and Zacharias did not belong to such a family.

Like [Emile] Puech and [Joe] Zias, he says the building is from the 1st century and the inscription is from the 4th century. But Jim Strange, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, says the recovery of the inscription is "quite amazing."

"Here you have something showing 4th-century Christians were trying to locate the traditional places of the gospels," he says. "We don't know if it actually is Zacharias's tomb ... but it is clear someone in the 4th century was convinced it was. This suggests that the Byzantine Christians had some piece of intelligence to make the identification. They spoke to locals who told them, 'We know where Zacharias and Simeon are buried.' "

He is calling for more searches for inscriptions nearby. "The Kidron Valley could be full of sites offering insights about what 4th-century Christians believed."

Zias says his discovery also tells us about the futility of disputes over sacred sites in the Holy Land. "If the Absalom Memorial is not Absalom's tomb, but rather Zacharias's Tomb, then we could ask, What about David's Tomb, or Rachel's Tomb, or Joseph's Tomb in Nablus? The question of whether we are killing each other over something authentic is highly relevant."

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre calls attention to the odd quote from Foerster to the effect that Zacharias was not of a Jewish priestly family in Jerusalem. I had vaguely noticed it but didn't take the time to follow it up when I made the posting. According to Luke 1:5 Zacharias was a priest of the division of Abijah and according to 1:8-23 he was actually serving in the Temple when he had the vision in which the angel Gabriel announced the coming birth of John. I don't know what Foerster was thinking � if, of course, he was quoted correctly.

UPDATE: More here.

UPDATE (19 December): I just noticed the following in this article:

Next to the Zacharias inscription, the two have also discerned the word Simeon, a reference, they say, to the old priest who recognized the infant Jesus as the Messiah.

The passage in Luke that mentions Simeon (2:25-35) never says he was a priest.

The Jerusalem Post article I linked to earlier also has lots of mistakes. It's always surprising to me how sloppy journalists are with anything I know about. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that they're pretty careless about everything.

PHILOLOGOS discusses the spelling of Hanukkah (Chanukah, Hanukah, Chanukkah).

THE EXHIBITION "ANCIENT TREASURES AND THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS" has moved from Montreal to Ottawa and here is an update on it.

OBITUARY OF A NOTED SEMITIC PHILOLOGIST:

Ben Segal

Public-spirited scholar of Aramaic and Hebrew studies

Geoffrey Khan
Tuesday December 9, 2003
The Guardian

Judah "Ben" Segal, who has died aged 91, was a leading scholar in the field of Aramaic and Hebrew studies. He was professor of semitic languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), in the University of London, from 1961 until his retirement in 1979.

Among much else, he was largely responsible for a degree course that allowed students to study all the major languages of the semitic family, including Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian and Ethiopic. This course, which sadly no longer exists, was unique in a British university at the time, and provided an excellent training for those who wished to undertake a research degree in semitic philology. It ensured that students gained a thorough knowledge of the languages and were able to read the most challenging texts, rather than simply learning "about" the languages.

Segal's own research was wide ranging. Several of his publications concerned the Christian Aramaic dialect known as Syriac, and the culture and literature of eastern Christianity. His first book, The Diacritical Point And The Accents In Syriac (1953), a study of the vowels of Syriac, is greatly admired by semitic philologists and often regarded as one of his best works.

In 1970, he published Edessa: The Blessed City, an erudite but very accessible historical study of the city of Edessa, modern Urfa in southern Turkey, where the Syriac language had its origins. He also made major contributions in the field of Hebrew and Jewish history; his book The Hebrew Passover From The Earliest Times To AD70 (1963) quickly became a standard work.

In retirement, Segal continued his scholarly research with considerable energy. . . .

He was also a war hero who operated in north Africa behind German lines, making good use of his knowledge of Arabic, and who provided intelligence that saved many allied lives. May his memory be for a blessing.

UPDATE (18 December): Rebecca Lesses has more on his work and, as a bonus, gives us the abstract for a paper she's now writing on images in the ancient Aramaic incantation bowls. Here's an example of one such image-bearing bowl from Gideon Bohak's Babylonian demon bowls online exhibition. I suppose we should assume that the sorcery skills of the bowl-makers were greater than their drawing skills.

THE POPE has seen the rough cut of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. No word yet on what he thought.

MORE ON THE INSCRIPTIONS AT "ABSALOM'S TOMB" from the Jerusalem Post. Not much in the article is new, but here are some things I don't remember being mentioned before:

[Emile] Puech adds that Absalom's Tomb is also mentioned in the Copper Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as in a 10th-century guidebook found in the 18th century in a Cairo synagogue storeroom.

[Shimon] Gibson says it was common practice for Byzantine monks to take over plundered tombs and retreat into them for solitude.

[...]

When Gibson finally entered the tomb, whose entrance is also nine meters up the wall, he made an additional discovery: a medieval inscription by a Jewish pilgrim.

Although the Jewish inscription is mentioned in an early 20th-century history of the site, Gibson says he was able to make a more accurate survey using 21st-century technology: a tracing made using a plastic sheet and a felt-tip pen.

The inscription, on an inside wall, mentions the name of the pilgrim, who Gibson speculates may have come from Spain.

"[It was] a sort of 'I was here' kind of thing," he says.

Although he believes there is nothing more to be found on the inside of the tomb, Puech suggests that the entire outside of the site should now be surveyed for further inscriptions.

UPDATE (18 December): Some errors in the article are caught here.

UPDATE (19 December): More here.

SURVEY OF QUMRAN STUDIES: I've agreed to do a brief survey of the field of Qumran/Dead Sea Scrolls studies, covering the period 1998 to the present, for the American Journal of Archaeology. I would be very grateful if readers would help me out by sending me information on the following:

1. Archaeology. If you have done excavation work relevant in some way to the Dead Sea Scrolls or the site of Qumran or if you have published something relating to the archaeology of the site, please e-mail me with the reference and a paragraph or two on what you've done or said. Web links would be good too. Notes of archaeological work or study in progress would be very helpful, as long as I can use the material for my essay.

2. Conferences. If during the relevant period you have held a conference on the Scrolls or Qumran, or have published a conference volume on the same, please e-mail me with information on the conference and/or the volume. If you can supply summaries or web page links, so much the better.

3. Museum exhibits on the Scrolls and/or Qumran, especially before March 2003 when I started this blog and started paying more attention to such things. Again, summaries and web links would be helpful.

Please note that I have very little space and will have to speak in the most general of terms, so I can't promise that I'll be able to give specific mention to anything you send me. But I will read everything I get very carefully and it will all help in building up the general picture.

As you can see above, the piece will make its way online in due course.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

ELDER AVRAHAM BRONSTEIN of Protocols has a review of Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt's Women in the Talmud in the Yeshiva University Commentator. (Requires free registration.)

THE FIRST VOLUME OF A NEW TRANSLATION OF THE ZOHAR has been published:

Daniel C. Matt (translator), The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Vol. 1

You can read a San Francisco Chronicle review by a proud nonspecialist here:

David Kipen, "Translated Kabbalah not for the layperson"

Excerpt:

The Zohar can also be, especially toward the end of the first volume, weirdly prophetic. In the Noah section, references crop up to what seem remarkably like dinosaurs and gravitation.

Appropriately enough, the first volume of the Pritzker "Zohar" ends with commentary on the Tower of Babel's destruction. God's punishment for our building the tower, remember, was the "confusion of languages," which sowed too much chaos for us ever to pull anything like that again. But without that curse of multiple languages, professional translators like Matt would be out of a job. For him the curse shapes up as, at worst, a mixed blessing.

For the rest of us, the new "Zohar" looks like a mixed blessing, too. The intrepid, especially those game to take one of the many Kabbalah classes offered around town, may now find the Zohar easier to tackle than ever before. But easier and easy are most emphatically not the same thing. Nobody should expect to read a few pages of the Pritzker "Zohar" and immediately see God. Just seeing straight would be an accomplishment.

There's also a customer review at the Amazon link above.

"NO SUCH THING AS A 'WAILING WALL.'" More Jewish-Temple denial:

Arafat's Mufti: No such thing as a 'Wailing Wall' (Jerusalem Post via Bible and Interpretation News)
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

On the same day that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was quoted as saying that he recognizes Jewish sovereignty over the Western Wall, his mufti, Ikremah Sabri, said on Friday that there is no such thing as a "Wailing Wall."

[...]

But the mufti, who was appointed by Arafat, told thousands of worshippers attending Friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa mosque that the Western Wall is part of the Al-Aqsa mosque and that it belongs to the Muslim Wakf (trust). "Seventy years ago the Committee of the League of Nations recognized the Al-Buraq Wall (Western Wall) as being part of the walls of the Al-Aqsa mosque," Sabri said.

The mufti pointed out that non-Islamic institutions accepted at the time the fact that the Al-Buraq Wall was a Muslim wall and attacked those who refer to it as the Western Wall.

[...]

In the interest of a reality check, the "Wailing Wall" is part of the western side of the massive retaining wall of Herod's Temple Mount (the lower, large stones in the photographs - especially clear in the third photo down). The Al-Aqsa mosque was built many centuries later.

FROM THE "THINK ABOUT THIS" FILE:

This man was born in France on December 14th 1503:


Nostradamus

And this man was captured in Tikrit on December 13th 2003:


Saddam Hussein

EXACTLY FIVE HUNDRED YEARS (minus one day) APART!

Coincidence? Do you really think so?

UPDATE (16 December): a couple of readers have e-mailed to point out that I didn't take into account the ten days added by the Gregorian calendar reform. All I can say is I hope that wasn't the only problem they found in this posting.

I HAVE ADDED UPDATES to my earlier posts on Matthew and the Talmud and Leviticus and gay marriage.

ACCESS TO THE TRADITIONAL SITE OF "JOSEPH'S TOMB" in Nablus has been violently contested in recent years.

INTERMARRIAGE IS A PROBLEM FOR THE SAMARITANS:

A Bad Time to Be a Samaritan (Newsday)
Middle Eastern sect fights to survive

By Conal Urquhart
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

December 15, 2003

Mount Gezirim, West Bank - When the apostle Luke told of Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, the Jews of this region regarded the Samaritans as a sect to be shunned. Nearly 2,000 years later, the Samaritans are fighting for survival, having dwindled to a community of a mere 600 or so, and it is they who have ostracized Sophie Sedaka.

Sedaka, 28, would seem to be an advertisement for the Samaritan community. As one of Israel's best-known actresses, she is one of the most prominent of the sect, now one of the Middle East's tiniest religious minorities.

But the Samaritans have a shortage of women. In an effort to preserve the community and its "purity," women - but not men - are forbidden to marry outsiders. Those who transgress are cut off completely. Sedaka transgressed, and now is treated by her sect as a foreigner.

[...]

The story is too complicated to excerpt, so read it all. This sort of thing is very difficult and I wish the Samaritan community the best in sorting out how to deal with such situations.

DOES THE TALMUD PROVE THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW TO BE EARLY?

I don't think so.

Talmud confirms an early Gospel of Matthew (Toronto Star)

NEIL ALTMAN AND DAVID CROWDER
OPINION

An ancient Jewish parody that quotes the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew may refute a major argument by biblical scholars who challenge the credibility of the Bible.

For more than a century, liberal scholars have contended that the Christian gospels are unreliable, second-hand accounts of Jesus' ministry that weren't put on paper until 70 to 135 A.D. or later � generations after those who witnessed the events of Jesus' ministry were dead.

Today's more liberal scholars say the Gospel of Matthew may have been aimed at Jews but it was written in Greek, not Hebrew.

They also believe that the Book of Mark, written in Greek, was the original gospel, despite the traditional order of the gospels in the Bible, putting Matthew first.

But a literary tale dated by some scholars at 72 A.D. or earlier, which comes from an ancient collection of Jewish writings known as the Talmud, quotes brief passages that appear only in the Gospel of Matthew. In his 1999 book, Passover And Easter: Origin And History To Modern Times, Israel Yuval of Jerusalem's Hebrew University says that Rabban Gamaliel, a leader of rabbinical scholars in about 70 A.D., is "considered to have authored a sophisticated parody of the Gospel according to Matthew."

[...]

In Rabbi Gamaliel's story, a daughter whose father had died offers a golden lamp as a bribe to a Christian judge known for his honesty, seeking a decision that would allow her to share her father's estate with her brother.

When the judge suggests that dividing the estate would be proper on the basis of a new law that had superseded the ancient Law of Moses, Gamaliel argues that the judge is wrong and loosely quotes a statement attributed to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

"Look further in the book, and it is written in it, `I have not come to take away from the Law of Moses nor add to the Law of Moses ... '" Gamaliel replies, and wins the case on the basis of that argument or the bribe he gave the judge � a "Libyan ass."

[...]

The argument, in a nutshell (and by all means read the whole article), is that the Talmud quotes Rabbi Gamaliel as quoting something rather like a passage in Matthew (5:18-19). Therefore he knew the Gospel of Matthew and it must have existed by his time, which, the authors say, means it must have been written before 70 or 72 C.E. (I'm not sure exactly why. Is this when he died? Or is the story set in pre-revolt Jerusalem?) Anyhow, I'll take their word about Gamaliel's date. There are still some big problems with the argument.

1. The Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli) was edited around 600 C.E. and the Palestinian Talmud (the Yerushalmi) around 400. Whichever Talmud they're talking about (probably the Bavli but they don't say - and they don't give the exact reference either) the story of the first-century saying of Gamaliel comes to us from a text edited many centuries later. How do we know that this isn't a much later legend which puts the saying in his mouth on the basis of knowing the Gospel of Matthew? Granted, the Talmud sometimes preserves early material, but earliness has to be proved, not assumed.

2. Even if Rabbi Gamaliel actually said this, the saying is not all that close to the Gospel of Matthew. How do we know that it isn't an oral tradition that Gamaliel picked up from Jesus' followers and which was later used independently by the author of Matthew?

Perhaps the book addresses these issues, but this article certainly doesn't convince me.

UPDATE (15 December): Stephen Goranson e-mails:

As your blog properly observed, Jim, the Altman and Crowder article does not prove (nor exclude) an early date for the Gospel of Matthew. (Nor did their similar article in the Kansas City Star, 7 July 2003.) Gamaliel the II--to whom the story was apparently attributed--lived many years after their date. But if this prompts anyone to read the article to which Israel Yuval referred, that may be worthwhile: Burton Visotzky, "Overturning the Lamp," JJS 38 (1987) 72-80. It's a good article, as my dissertation noted. But his nuanced reading of b.Shabbat 116a-b certainly allows for later dating. In any case, this section has potentially interesting information about a gospel, evangelion--punned against as (avon-gilyon, book of sin or )aven-gilyon, book of vanity--and the verse said to be at the end of the book.

The section is quite interesting. It includes a discussion of whether to save books of the minim (heretics) in the case of a fire. Via puns, as long
recognized by many scholars (my 1990 diss. pp92-94 has bibliography), these are the houses of the Nazarenes and Ebionites, Be Nitsraphi and Be )Abidan. See Anchor Bible on how these two terms evolved. Gamaliel II, of course, was associated in Talmud with the origin or revising of the Birkat ha-minim, the blessing/curse on heretics, known in many versions.

The Talmud version gives the mirror image of the account of heretics in Epiphanius (Panarion, 29 & 30). For the Christian Epiphanius (circa 375), the Ebionites were the more heretical of the two groups. For the rabbis, none would save books from the Nazarene house, but some consideration was allowed for possibly rescuing books from the house of Ebionites.

JESUS AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE GALILEE: This Washington Post article is a nice summary of the current state of the question regarding the archaeology of the Galilee in the time of Jesus. (Granted, there was a lot of background chatter - some of it mine - while I was reading it, but I didn't spot anything that looked wrong.) This is a very difficult and controversial subject and the article does a good job of nuancing the issues. Well done, Mr. Broadway.

Digging Back Toward Jesus
Biblical Archaeology Uncovering Evidence About Places and People's Lives in Gospel Times

By Bill Broadway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 13, 2003; Page B09

Many Christians were upset when Israeli antiquities experts recently declared a 1st-century inscription bearing Jesus's name a fake, seemingly depriving them of the earliest archaeological proof of Jesus's existence.

Those who take such a view misunderstand the point of biblical archaeology, said Craig A. Evans, professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia and an expert on ossuaries, the small burial boxes like the one discovered last fall in which was carved in Aramaic: "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

"Archaeology isn't so much about proving the Bible," said Evans, an evangelical Christian who said he thinks the James inscription ultimately could be proved authentic. The importance of archaeology is that it "clarifies and contextualizes the story of the Bible."

What many people don't realize, Evans and other scholars said, is that archaeologists in recent years have been searching for -- and finding -- contextual clues to the world inhabited by Jesus and his followers.

"We don't even have much direct archaeological evidence that [Jesus] walked this earth," says Hershel Shanks, editor of Washington-based Biblical Archaeological Review and host of "An Archaeological Search for Jesus," a new five-part video/DVD series featuring more than 20 leading archaeologists and biblical scholars. "What we have is lots and lots of evidence about the world he lived in."

Some of the most notable discoveries have been in the northern part of Israel known as the Galilee, an agriculturally rich area where Jesus grew up and spent most of his three-year ministry.

That evidence shows, among other things, that Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew -- a perspective at odds with beliefs that Jesus rejected Judaism to form a new religion or taught a pagan-influenced humanist philosophy, Shanks and other scholars said. It also indicates that Jesus was a cultured sophisticate, not the peasant naif portrayed in many Sunday school texts.

Foremost have been excavations at Sepphoris, a magnificent 1st-century city four miles from Nazareth; at Capernaum, a fishing village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus's ministry was based; and at what may have been Bethsaida, home of three apostles and the third most-mentioned town in the Gospels.

There's lots more, so do read it all.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW:

Unsettled': So Was It Odd of God?
By JONATHAN ROSEN

Published: December 14, 2003

Melvin Konner is neither a conventional scholar of Judaism nor a historian -- two reasons, perhaps, why his sweeping study of the Jews feels so fresh and alive. And if he isn't quite an expert, he's hardly a novice. A practicing Orthodox Jew until 17, when he lost his faith and a measure of his interest, he began working his way back to Judaism (if not belief) in the 1980's, after his first child was born. Soon he was studying, traveling to Israel and creating a course at Emory, where he is a professor of anthropology, to synthesize his findings. ''Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews'' is, he tells us, the result of a personal as well as a scholarly journey.
Advertisement

''Unsettled'' follows a roughly historical outline, from the earliest prebiblical days through the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the subsequent scattering of the Jews, the Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel and the Jewish encounter with America. It covers the golden ages in Spain and Poland and is equally zealous in tracking down Jewish communities in China, India and Afghanistan.

[�]

But while Konner is attuned to the way external events helped shape the very essence of the religion, his historical accounts are shot through with a contemporary consciousness, so that the public readings of the Torah in the marketplace by Ezra the Scribe after the exiles from Babylonia returned are not so different from today's Torah service. Perhaps this is what Konner means by ''an anthropology,'' since he is not studying a fixed point in the past but a people who, for all the cultures they have lived in and generated, maintain a far-flung cohesion -- with the past and with one another. Konner finds this true even when comparing mountain Jews of Ethiopia sitting in darkness on the Sabbath and Ashkenazic Jews with an elaborate Talmudic culture unknown to their Ethiopian cousins.

[�]

Sounds interesting.

YASSER ARAFAT ON THE JEWISH PEOPLE'S LINK TO PALESTINE:

Asked what he has to say in response to the accusations he does not recognize the Jewish people's link to the land, Arafat said, "They are entirely untrue. My religion, Islam, obliges me to respect Judaism and Jewish history, whose prophets are revered in the holy Koran as God's messengers. While we insist that East Jerusalem be the capital of a Palestinian state, and that the Haram al-Sharif, on which are situated the two mosques, Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, come under Palestinian sovereignty, we accept Jewish sovereignty over the Wailing Wall and over the Jewish quarter of the Old City. We accept this only because we recognize and respect the Jewish religion and the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine."

I don't know about you, but I'm not satisfied with this. Maybe it's progress, but I want to hear Mr. Arafat say forthrightly that there was a Jewish temple in antiquity (two of them, in fact) on the Temple Mount (the Haram al-Sharif) and that claims to the contrary are completely false.

BLOGGER WAS DOWN this morning, then this afternoon my computer developed a problem with Internet access. Actually it developed a number of problems, but I was able to resolve all but this one myself. (Well, most of the others. Some of them.) Then things got quite exciting when my neighbor, who knows about such things, narrowed the glitch down to either a faulty cable or a faulty internal modem. Fortunately it turned out to be the cable, so I'm back.

SALMON SCHOCKEN, founder of Schocken Press (which specializes in Judaica and which appears not to have a website), is the subject of a book that is reviewed in the Forward. Excerpt:

Man of the Book: Reading a Life of Salman Schocken

The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken (1877-1959)
By Anthony David
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company), 352 pages, $30.



By MINDY ALOFF

You may have never heard of the publisher Salman Schocken, an intellectual's businessman as well as a businessman's intellectual; even some leading New York editors of the past 30 years know little about him. But if you've ever read "In Mr. Lublin's Shop" by S.Y. Agnon � a writer whom Schocken essentially discovered, supported and promoted for the Nobel Prize in Literature � you've encountered a portrait of him. And if you ever bought a paperback edition of the works of Franz Kafka or Gershom Scholem in the United States in the 1950s or 1960s, you were directly affected by Schocken's taste � at least, by a small dimension of it.

Schocken Books, the last of the publishing companies devoted to what is now called Judaica, was the comparatively reduced American outpost of Schocken's publishing enterprise, which began magisterially with a rich and risk-taking array of German books in Weimar Berlin and continued with an extensive Hebrew publishing program in pre-World War II Palestine, where Schocken also owned the daily newspaper Ha'aretz and served as the head of administration for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His English-language publishing venture was founded last, in 1947, when Schocken was 70. Based in New York City (where it was supported primarily by Schocken's luck in real-estate investment), its most important holdings were the copyrights to the complete works of Kafka. In the large map of New York publishing, though, Schocken Books has been considered a comparatively minor house, a niche or specialty publisher, and Schocken himself has rarely inspired curiosity outside a small circle of other Jewish �migr�s.

This is likely to change with the appearance of Anthony David's monumental new biography, "The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken 1877-1959." David's absorbing chronicle covers not only Schocken's extensive mercantile, publishing, bibliophilic, philanthropic and scholarly achievements; his cultural and intellectual ideals; his several exiles (from Germany to Palestine and then from Israel to the United States) and restless travels; his amazing literary instincts and steely business acumen, and his 50-year marriage in which he fathered five children, all of whom led reasonably good lives, but also his numerous extramarital affairs and his decision, at age 73, to leave his loveless union with his wife, Lilly, saying, "Now, I am a free man."

[...]

UPDATE: Here's another review of the same book in the Jerusalem Post. And here's the website for Schocken Books.

THE JOURNAL OF GRECO-ROMAN CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM has been brought back on the McMaster Divinity College website (heads up, Mark Goodacre). The journal disappeared from the old site some time ago and its domain name was taken over by people who sell Viagra and suchlike. (No, I'm not going to link to it.) At the moment only volume one from 2000 is up (and it has lots of interesting articles, so do take a look), but I hope this means that we'll be seeing new articles again soon.

THE MEGIDDO EXPEDITION is looking for volunteers to dig in the 2004 season (again via Bible and Interpretation News).

THE WAQF has begun a new excavation on the Temple Mount, which they say is to replace a sewer line (WorldNetDaily via Bible and Intepretation News). This despite recent assurances from the Israeli Security Minister that no more construction would be undertaken there.

ART HISTORIAN Elizabeth Lev saw a rough cut of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in a showing in Rome this week (was this the Vatican showing requested by the Pope?) and she liked it.

UPDATE: It appears to be the same showing.

LEVITICUS AND THE GAY MARRIAGE DEBATE: David Klinghoffer, writing for Beliefnet, thinks that conservatives shouldn't be shy about citing Leviticus 18:22 to oppose the legalization of gay marriage. I don't think I've ever fisked a whole article before, but it seems to be in order here. I don't agree with his political position, but that's neither here nor there. If he were taking a position I agreed with, I would still have the same objections. What bothers me is his arguing for a political goal on the basis of assumptions many citizens of the polity don't share, his na�ve understanding of history, and his inconsistent and erroneous exegesis even from within his own set of assumptions.

Bring Back the A-Word
Why conservatives shouldn't be shy about citing the 'abomination' Bible verse when objecting to gay marriage.
By David Klinghoffer

Just as homosexuality was once the love that dare not speak its name, there is a Bible verse that opponents of gay marriage rarely speak. It is Leviticus 18:22, which reads: �You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman, it is an abomination.� These ancient words, the Bible�s most direct statement on homosexuality, need to be rehabilitated. Why? Because American security and prosperity are linked with the sexual norms we sanction.

If you keep track of Leviticus on Google News (as, believe it or not, some of us do - sorry, the links are mostly dead now), you'll find that the verse is cited fairly frequently in media discussions about gay issues. Of course recently it's been coming up mainly in connection with major warpo Fred Phelps. One can perhaps sympathize with conservatives who don't want to be associated with him. But abusus non tollit usus, so let's see what Klinghoffer does with the verse.

A rabbinic interpretive tradition (one which goes back at least to the fourth century C.E. and is found in the midrashic book Sifra) understands another verse in Leviticus 18 to mean that the locals in Canaan actually conducted same-sex marriages, among other forbidden sexual practices the Canaanite peoples had sanctioned. It was for this that God ejected them from the holy land: �Do not become contaminated through any of these [acts]; for through all of these the nations that I expel before you became contaminated. The land became contaminated and I recalled its iniquity upon it; and the land disgorged it inhabitants� (vv. 24-25). The Canaanites suffered national defeat, invasion, humiliation. Finally, they disappeared from history. (Did you ever meet a �Canaanite�?)

The word "Canaanite" is a very slippery one: "Canaan" is a geographical term in the second millennium B.C.E., the name of an Egyptian province corresponding roughly to Palestine and part of southern Syria. But the political units of the time were the individual city-states, ruled by a king, and if you had asked one of these people if he was a "Canaanite" he probably would have said, "No, I'm a man of Hazor (Byblos, Jerusalem, etc.)."

"Canaanite" is one name in the Bible (there are others: Amorite, Jebusite, Hittite, etc.; see, e.g., Exodus 3:8) which refers to a number of groups who are best described as speakers of Northwest Semitic dialects close to (and probably mutually comprehensible with) Hebrew, with whom the Israelites had a disagreement about who should own the land. Whether the Israelites actually invaded from outside the land or grew up within it is a question still hotly debated by historians. In any case, for some centuries the Israelites were more the winners than the losers of the argument. We have less information about these speakers of Northwest Semitic than we would like, but we know that they were polytheists (like the rest of the peoples of the ancient Near East except at least some Israelites); that some of them practiced human sacrifice (as did some Israelites); and that they had the sort of myths, legends, and customs that we would expect people in that part of the world at that time to have. (This doesn't include same-sex marriage, by the way: Klinghoffer has to slip in a fourth-century C.E. midrash to connect that with them.) There's nothing about their morality or religion (the little we know of either) that marks them as unusual in comparison to contemporary ancient peoples. The Assyrians were also idolators and were far more cruel and barbaric.

It's not unreasonable to assume that at least some of the genetic material of the present-day Palestinians goes back to the "Canaanites." There's been lots of genetic mixing with other groups (e.g., Crusaders), but that's true for Jews as well (e.g., proselytes and converts). If one accepts some connection between the modern Palestinians and the "Canaanites," the argument over the land continues today and they are not a spent force.

Our only basis for the view that the ancient "Canaanites" were utterly despicable and depraved is some elements in the biblical narrative, which assert with not a great deal of moral consistency that they were so evil that God ordered the Israelites to slaughter them, men, women, and children (e.g., Deuteronomy 20:16-18; Joshua 6:17-21). This custom of imposing the herem or "ban" ("devotion" to destruction) on enemies was also practiced by the neighboring Moabites. The main issue, in both cases, came down to the view of one side that their God had given them the land currently occupied by the other side.

I've gone on at length about this to put in context my point that Klinghoffer is indulging in comic-book theology. His Canaanites are cardboard pop-up baddies, bereft of moral complexity and depth. He is accepting a simplistic and completely uncritical reading of the highly ideological biblical stories, spiced up by much later rabbinic legend, and advancing it as though it were serious history, upon which he then wants to build an in-itself-dubious post-hoc, propter-hoc theology. This argument is not worth taking seriously on any level.

The Bible doesn't frown on gay sex uniquely. In the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), homosexual intercourse isn�t the only act called an �abomination.� The book of Deuteronomy applies the terms to certain unethical business practices, which in Leviticus are denounced as a �perversion� (see Deut. 25:16, Lev. 19:35).

But same-sex intimacy is unique (along with incest and sex with animals) in being pointed to as among the failings of a non-Jewish people, the Canaanites, that brought about that group�s final moral dissolution. I don�t know of another category of sin that, in the biblical context, is both a) explicitly made applicable to gentiles and b) is spoken of in such emphatic terms as leading to societal breakdown, whether the society in question is Jewish or not.

Basic moral principles apply not only to Jews, in other words, but to all people, even those that don't follow Jewish dietary laws. If any country defies them, it will suffer a fate akin to the Canaanites'. The men and women of Canaan were not held responsible for not observing the Jewish Sabbath--to pick another example of a practice asked only of Jews; but they were held responsible for rejecting the fundamental moral tenet that marriage is between a man and a woman.

By this reasoning we also have to postulate a fundamental moral tenet that a man and woman aren't allowed to have sexual intercourse during her "menstrual uncleanness" (Leviticus 18:19 - three verses before Klinghoffer's major proof text and in the same paragraph and the same context). Then in verses 24-29 (RSV, cited in part by Klinghoffer above) we're told:

24: "Do not defile yourselves by any of these things [in vv. 6-23], for by all these the nations I am casting out before you defiled themselves;
25: and the land became defiled, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.
26: But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you
27: (for all of these abominations the men of the land did, who were before you, so that the land became defiled);
28: lest the land vomit you out, when you defile it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.
29: For whoever shall do any of these abominations, the persons that do them shall be cut off from among their people.

My emphasis. The text makes no distinction among the defiling sins in vv. 6-23. By Klinghoffer's logic, the "abomination" of sex during menstrual uncleanness is every bit as much of a threat to society as homosexual marriage. If he were consistent, he would have to assert this.

Back to Klinghoffer:

The message is clear: If the Bible possesses any real authority as a communication of God�s thoughts about man, then a country�s safety and stability are related to the kinds of sexual relationships it endorses.

I don't grant the truth of this statement: there are theological understandings of biblical authority that don't require this conclusion at all. But more importantly, I refuse to debate this political issue on these terms. Americans and Britons (I'm both) live in pluralistic societies that don't take a scripture, any scripture, as their legal or constitutional basis.

This doesn't mean we have to stone gays or carry out any of the other penalties for misbehavior outlined in the Hebrew Bible. These are meant to be applied only in a Jewish commonwealth, and then only under very special conditions. (There needs to be a Temple in Jerusalem with a high-court, or Sanhedrin, sitting in judgment there on capital trials. Look for these when the Messiah comes, ushering in a new world full of the knowledge of God where the need for harsh justice will thus be exceedingly rare.)

I notice that Klinghoffer didn't cite Leviticus 20:13 as his proof text ("If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them." RSV). He's being quite inconsistent here: if biblical rules against homosexuality are so critically important for the survival of our society now, how can he say that the biblical penalty prescribed for the offending act is only meant for the messianic future? Why not say that the rule has only a future application too, when the penalty can be applied? And he doesn't explain where he gets all the stuff about the Temple in Jerusalem and the Sanhedrin, neither of which figure in Leviticus at all. He certainly gives the appearance of backpedaling so as not to come across as utterly barbaric; and a consistent position along these lines would be utterly barbaric.

There is no turning back the clock to biblical times. But conservatives have gotten into the habit of explaining our doubts about homosexual marriage in highly pragmatic, rationalistic terms having nothing to do with religion. Conservative pundits say you have to keep your arguments secular to reach the ideological middle.

To them, citing Leviticus would seem the grossest violation of good manners. But the advance of sanctioned gay marriage, creeping like ivy across the face of the American legal system, shows the futility of this strategy.

Let us consider telling the truth about what underlies the case against homosexual matrimony. After all, many Americans look to the Bible for their values. We live in a culture imbued, from the Pilgrims onward, with Old Testament values. That's who we are.

Any Bible-believer must agree that it�s God�s will, not man�s intellect, which decides profound moral questions. If conservatives started talking biblically about homosexual marriage, we would stand to energize those of our fellow citizens who share our traditional values.

After all, we are talking about laws of nature as God made it. An ancient rabbinic teaching says that in creating the world, He first looked in the Torah, Scripture�s first five books and their explanatory traditions. In other words, the Bible is not a set of arbitrarily imposed rules. It�s a blueprint of how the world works.

Mr. Klinghoffer, you are refreshingly candid about your presuppositions and agenda and I give you credit for that. Okay, you believe the Torah is a blueprint of how the world works, that it consists of "laws of nature," and that it rather than your intellect must decide profound moral questions. Fine. Follow it as you understand it and as you see fit. It is your right to conduct your personal life that way, which right I would support with all my strength. But a great many people in our society don't believe what you believe and the laws of our society aren't built on your presuppositions. If you want to convince the rest of us to do what you want, you're going to have to argue on the basis of something other than biblical authority. If you can't do that, we're going to ignore you and get on with the business of running a pluralistic society.

We Americans don�t live in a society governed by Mosaic law. However, neither did the Canaanites. When the Bible speaks of their moral failings in very specific ethical areas, and the consequent downfall of their civilization, there is a lesson not just for a Jewish society but for everyone. The way God sets things up, a society that institutionalizes same-sex unions will ultimately suffer tragic consequences--�disgorgement� from its place in the world. What, in very concrete terms, would that mean? Let�s hope we don�t have to find out.

I've read this paragraph over and over to try to understand it fairly and it still makes me very uncomfortable. He seems to be saying that, not the whole Mosaic law, but specific parts of it that he has seized on (using poor and inconsistent exegesis even on his own terms - see above) are so important to God that if we don't follow them we can expect the downfall of our civilization: God will "disgorge" us. The implication is that Americans must make - or refrain from making - their laws on the basis of Klinghoffer's version of biblical morality and his beliefs about biblical authority or else they're doomed. The argument isn't internally consistent in the first place and it doesn't work for anyone who doesn't share his religious presuppositions. It amounts to wanting the state to make political decisions on the basis of a narrow interpretation of a particular scripture, which strikes me as a very bad idea.

Mr. Klinghoffer, if you want to convince anyone who doesn't share your starting assumptions, you need to try again.

UPDATE (12 December): Welcome, readers of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. For more information about this blog, have a look at the "About PaleoJudaica.com" link to the right. If you are interested in ancient biblical and related history, please do visit again.

UPDATE: Reader Carla Sulzbach points to this 1999 article in Midstream by Thomas Herz, "Judaism and Homosexuality: Myth and Emeth," which also takes issue with views like Klinghoffer's.

UPDATE (14 December): Historian Gary Leupp reflects on the cross-cultural history of human sexuality and marriage in his Counterpunch essay "On Marriage in 'Recorded History.' An Open Letter to Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney."

UPDATE (15 December): Judith Weiss and her readers comment. Duncan Frissel comments:

One might wonder if Davila would make the same argument against Marxists or Republicans who base their political arguments on premises most people don't share or indeed anyone else.

Yes I would. Probably not here, unless they were discussing ancient Judaism. Otherwise I tend to pursue my (numerous) political arguments elsewhere.

Aren't all arguments made from presuppositions everyone in the polity doesn't share or else there would be no argument.

To the degree that one makes arguments based entirely on an ideology (fundamentalist religion, Marxism, etc., take your pick), to that degree people who don't share that ideology won't be convinced. I don't see what's so difficult about this point. And it's perfectly fair game to say to someone, I don't share the presuppositions behind that argument. Either convince me of them or convince me of your point with another argument.

As for the application of parts of Mosaic law and not others (no on sodomy, yes on eating unclean animals) this is long established Christian Theology.

My argument was more subtle than that. I said that Mr. Klinghoffer is inconsistent in his exegesis on the basis of his own presuppositions (which incidentally don't involve Christian theology).

And unless one spends a lot of time attacking almost everyone for making stupid arguments based on personal assumptions,

Why should we accept other people's stupid arguments based on personal assumptions and not challenge them? As for me, if people want to make historically inaccurate or exegetically (or otherwise) nonsensical claims about things having to do with ancient Judaism or the ancient biblical world, I'm likely to challenge them. Read my archives. No doubt I've missed some, but I do have a few other things to do, like my job for instance.

to concentrate on religious believers suggests unwarranted discrimination. There is a thread of belief on the Left (which I don't know if Davila shares) holding that religious beliefs have little or no place in politics or governance. But they should actually be treated like any other beliefs.

Sorry, but that first bit is just loopy. I love the phrase "unwarranted discrimination," as though I were a government agency or an insurance company. All "beliefs" of any kind, when advanced as arguments, are open to challenges regarding their consistency with the evidence and their internal consistency. I most certainly do not just concentrate on religious believers, as anyone who reads me regularly or bothers to look through my archives knows (and in any case, it's my blog and I'll cover what I want). (Don't assume I have no religious beliefs. This blog is not about them or about many other things, and I try most of the time to keep on topic.)

What I do in PaleoJudaica is to give my expert opinion (as a philologist and historian of religion) on what's being said in the media and on the Internet about ancient Judaism and related matters, as I have time and as things strike me as interesting. I dish out a good bit of criticism, a good bit of praise, and a good bit of critical interaction. I also frequently note things with no comment. Occasionally I toss in something irrelevant because I feel like it. I make mistakes sometimes and when I find out about them I correct them. If Duncan doesn't like what I cover in this blog and how I cover it, I will cheerfully refund his subscription fee.

UPDATE (19 December): Lloyd Letta and Joseph the "Amateur Philosopher (scroll down) comment.

PHILOLOGOS writes on the Lachish Letters:

Language of Lachish

Sandra Metzger writes to ask:

"Would you possibly know of an ancient battle that sounds like 'Lekesh' but is spelled differently? I read about it 20 years ago in a book on archaeology and the Bible, which was later stolen in Liverpool, England, when in transport back to America. A hole in my memory prevents me from remembering the spelling to look it up."

Liverpool must have had some very intellectual thieves. In any case, I am glad to be able to restore to Ms. Metzger the name of her lost battle, which was the battle of Lachish, pronounced "Lah-KHEESH.'"

What does this battle have to do with a language column? Quite a lot, actually, because in archaeological excavations conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Lachish, a hilltop 10 miles west of Hebron near where the mountains of Judea meet the coastal plain, a number of fascinating and dramatic Hebrew ostraca � inscriptions written on shards of broken pottery � from the exact period in which the battle was fought were discovered. Many of these consisted of letters or fragments of them written by a Judean army officer named Hosha'yahu to his commander Ya'ush, who was stationed with his troops in Lachish while awaiting an attack from the forces of the Babylonian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. They teach us some new Hebrew expressions from biblical times, cause us to rethink some old ones and occasion some reflections about what is and isn't known regarding the language of the Bible.

[...]

All this makes one reflect that, as large and varied a book as the Bible is, its Hebrew represents only a part of the Hebrew spoken in biblical times, about which we need to avoid overly hard-and-fast assumptions. Readers of this column may remember, for instance, how, several months ago, in a discussion of an alleged eighth-century BCE inscription supposedly found on the Temple Mount, I argued that a Hebrew expression occurring in it, and used differently from the way it is used in biblical texts, might be authentic nonetheless. This contention was scoffed at by a number of biblical scholars and the inscription, indeed, has meanwhile been declared counterfeit by the Israel Anitiquities Department; but the example of the Lachish letters shows clearly, I think, that in principle I was right. There are several linguistic usages in these letters that, had suspicion been cast on the ostraca they were written on, could have been taken by the same scholars as proof that these ostraca were fake too.

[...]

This is a good point and needs to be kept in mind. In the case of the "Joash Inscription" (which is the one to which Philologos is referring), the problem was that it drew heavily on the biblical passages relating to the Temple but also mixed in anachronistic usages that were unlikely to be ancient. Epigraphers agreed that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of it being a forgery. See the essays of Hurowitz and Ahituv on the Bible and Interpretation website. (These require Hebrew fonts that I don't have, but you can still follow the argument in general without them.)

UPDATE: The earlier Philologos columns that discuss the "Joash Inscription" are here and here. This seems to be a case of using the right arguments to reach the wrong conclusion, which happens to us all sometimes.

THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF QUMRAN STUDIES wins the prize for fastest turnaround of a conference paper proposal, with an acceptance arriving from Florentino Garc�a Mart�nez in under half an hour. The paper is for the July meeting in Groningen (overlapping with the International SBL meeting) and is titled "The Odes of Isaiah: A Newly Discovered Syriac Pseudepigraphon - A Thought Experiment." For now I think I'll hold onto the abstract. I will say that this is part of yet another chapter of the book I'm working on. I look forward very much to seeing the usual suspects in Groningen this summer.

TWO NEW BOOKS FROM SCM:

A Rabbi Reads the Psalms

2nd Edition

Jonathon Magonet

This second enlarged edition of Jonathon Magonet's 1994 introduction to the Jewish reading of the Psalms will be welcomed. It has become a staple of university reading lists and helped many take their first steps in understanding the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and offers an insight into the different kinds of spiritual understanding to be found in Jewish Tradition. Two new studies of Psalms 51 and 118 are included in this edition.

2nd Ed 0 334 02953 8 216x135mm�� 200pp �14.99 February�2004


A Rabbi Reads the Bible

2nd Edition

Jonathan Magonet

Since it's first appearance in 1991, Jonathan Magonet's introduction to the Jewish reading of Scripture has proved immensely popular. The informal style and wit open a wide range of scholarly issues to the general and specialist reader, and encourage a journey of discovery into unfamiliar tradition and modern Jewish approaches to the text of the Bible. Two new chapters add to the value of this stimulating book.

2nd Ed 0 334 02952 X 180pp 216x135mm �14.99 February 2004

No Amazon entries available yet for these editions.

THE MINIMALIST-MAXIMALIST DISCUSSION CONTINUES on Bible and Interpretation News. In this short installment, Robert D. Miller II tells us "How Post-Modernism (and W. F. Albright) Can Save Us from Malarkey." If you know more about White and Burke than I do (i.e., anything), you will probably get more out of it than I did. But I commend Professor Miller for talking about postmodern history without once using the word "hegemony."

NOW THAT'S A FAST TURNAROUND! This morning I sent off a paper proposal for the Apocrypha section of the July 2004 International Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Groningen. I got an acknowledgement, sent at 6:58 am EST, telling me I should receive an answer by February 1st. Fair enough. But then I got a message from Matthew Collins, sent at 8:11 am EST, accepting the paper. Is that efficient service or what?

For those of you interested, here's the abstract of the paper. It's a summary of another chapter in the book I'm working on and deals with my usual hobby-horses of late.

Did Christians Write Old Testament Pseudepigrapha that Appear to be Jewish?

In recent years I and others have argued that the proper starting point for the study of Old Testament pseudepigrapha transmitted only by Christians is the earliest surviving manuscripts. We cannot assume that, if such works lack obviously Christian features (or contain only a few), they were written by Jews. It remains possible that they were written by Christians who, for whatever reason, omitted such elements.

This paper presents some lateral but positive evidence that Christians in fact did this. Christians wrote documents in the same genres as the Jewish pseudepigrapha (apocalypses, liturgies, oracles, rewritten scripture). They also attributed anonymous Old Testament pseudepigrapha without explicitly Christian features to named Christian authors, such as Tertullian, so ancient Christians themselves saw nothing implausible in the idea of a Christian writing such a work.

Moreover, in some cases texts (including hymns, sermons, and sections of biblical commentaries) on Old Testament themes by known Christian authors (e.g., John Chrysostom and Ephrem Syrus) contain either no explicitly Christian features or else very few and of a such nature that, had the works been transmitted anonymously as Old Testament pseudepigrapha, some modern scholars would excise these features as secondary and take the works to be Jewish pseudepigrapha. Sometimes these documents even include material (e.g., positive references to the Law or circumcision) which we would normally expect of Jewish authors.

Although these observations do not prove that Christians wrote pseudepigrapha that appear to be Jewish, they show that this possibility is entirely consonant with surviving evidence, and they reinforce the principle that for Old Testament pseudepigrapha transmitted by Christians the burden of proof is on anyone who asserts that the works are Jewish compositions. This is an important methodological filter for preventing extraneous sources from contaminating our understanding of ancient Judaism.

By the way, for some reason access to Blogger has been up and down all day. Sorry if any of you have had trouble accessing this site. The problem is outside my control.

A SHORT BOOK REVIEW by Peter F. Neumeyer in the Boston Globe:

Gerald McDermott, having begun by making films of mythologies, consulted with the great Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell. From there he went to writing and painting prize-winning books, often traditional tales or trickster mythologies. This time McDermott says his story "Creation" (written and illustrated by Gerald McDermott; Dutton; n.p.; ages 7 and up; $16.99) is based "on Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 of the Hebrew Bible, with an eye toward its antecedents in the ancient Near East" as well as on 13th- and 14th-century French and Spanish accounts.

McDermott's stunning, exalted illustrations are on handmade mulberry-bark paper whose organic textures inspired the swirls and shadings of his gesso-and-fabric color paintings. He writes that he intends the book to be "an outer expression of the inner reality that connects every human soul." In that, it succeeds. It is an eloquent object of beauty, for any age, and necessary for our times.

You can read additional reviews by following the Amazon link that I've added to this review.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

Corley, Jeremy
Ben Sira's Teaching on Friendship
Reviewed by Alice M. Sinnott

Satlow, Michael
Jewish Marriage in Antiquity
Reviewed by Charlotte Fonrobert

Schwab, George M.
The Song of Songs' Cautionary Message Concerning Human Love
Reviewed by Richard G. Smith

Bauckham, Richard
Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels
Reviewed by Sharyn Dowd

Scott, Douglas
Edited by S. R. Llewelyn
New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity: A Review of the Greek Inscriptions and Papyri Published 1986-87
Reviewed by John S. Kloppenborg

A MONTH AGO I wrote that the Zeitschrift f�r die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft was not available online. I was wrong. With a paid institutional or personal subscription you can access the full text of it (follow the link above). The current issue is 115.4 and it contains the following articles in PDF format:

JOHN VAN SETERS
An Ironic Circle: Wellhausen and the Rise of Redaction Criticism
Seiten 487�500
[pdf (60 kb)]

KARIN SCH�PFLIN
Jakob segnet seinen Sohn. Genesis 49,1�28 im Kontext von Josefs- und V�tergeschichte
Seiten 501�523
[pdf (98 kb)]

JEAN L�HOUR
L�Impur et le Saint dans le Premier Testament � partir du livre du L�vitique Partie I: L�Impur et le Pur
Seiten 524�537
[pdf (62 kb)]

ANSELM C. HAGEDORN
Deut 17,8�13. Procedure for Cases of Pollution?
Seiten 538�556
[pdf (112 kb)]

ROBERT COUFFIGNAL
De la b�te � l�ange: le Psaume 23, miroir de l�aventure spirituelle
Seiten 557�577
[pdf (101 kb)]

CORNELIUS B. HOUK
Syllable-Word Patterns in Esther
Seiten 578�585
[pdf (43 kb)]

ARMIN D. BAUM
Zu Funktion und Authentizit�tsanspruch der oratio recta. Hebr�ische und griechische Geschichtsschreibung im Vergleich
Seiten 586�607
[pdf (94 kb)]

Mitteilungen

GEORG FISCHER
Zur Lage der Pentateuchforschung
Seiten 608�616
[pdf (53 kb)]

ARON PINKER
Infertile Quartet of Flora / Symposium
Seiten 617�624
[pdf (63 kb)]

The full text of the journal is available back through 2001, with tables of contents listed back through 1997.

MORE ON THE PROTOCOLS EXHIBITION in the new Library of Alexandria. This morning I received the following e-mail from Sherif. E. Elaish, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Public Relations Department:

Public Statement by Ismail Serageldin
Alexandria, 4 December-The following statement is attributable to the Director of the Library of Alexandria, Dr. Ismail Serageldin:
"Recent press reports concerning the presence of the first Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in an exhibition in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina deserve a prompt and clear reply. Preliminary investigation determined that the book was briefly displayed in a showcase devoted to rotating samples of curiosities and unusual items in our collection. The book was never displayed alongside the Jewish Torah nor has it ever been stated that it is a holy book or the basis for a Jewish constitution. The book is a well-known 19th century fabrication to foment anti-Jewish feelings.
"The book was promptly withdrawn from public display, but its very inclusion showed bad judgment and insensitivity, and an internal administrative hearing is underway to determine whether further action is to be taken.
"The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is profoundly committed to its role as a center of learning and a place promoting tolerance, dialogue and understanding between peoples, cultures and civilizations. We are honored to work with distinguished international partners in promoting these universal ideals".

I have sent the following reply:

Dear Dr. Serageldin,

Thank you very much for this information. I commend you for your prompt and proper action regarding this unfortunate situation.

Would you please comment on the interview with Dr. Yousef Ziedan (who is named as the director of the manuscript museum at the Library of Alexandria) in Al Usbu', translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute and available online at http://www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD61903? According to this interview Dr. Ziedan said:

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.

"Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it� It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

He is also quoted as having made sarcastic, bizarre, and inaccurate statements about the Holocaust in this interview. Are the quotations in the interview correct and, if so, what is your position as Director of the Library on his comments? If the quotations misrepresent what he said, what is the source of the error?

I am putting your statement below [it's above in this post] on my weblog, PaleoJudaica and, if you have no objection, I would like also to post there your reply to my queries above.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Also, it appears that I misread the introduction to the MEMRI translation in my earlier posts here and here. Dr. Yousef Ziedan is director of the manuscripts museum at the new Library of Alexandria, not the director of the whole library. I apologize for the error.

BIBLICAL STUDIES IN ISRAEL is a year abroad program aimed at Christian undergraduates. It is organized by a Christian group called the Jerusalem Cornerstone Foundation in cooperation with the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is directed by Dr. Randall Buth, a specialist in Aramaic whom I've mentioned now and again on this blog. The program's website says:

Biblical Studies in Israel is a year abroad program for Christian undergraduate students majoring in biblical studies or related fields. The BSI program is directed by Dr. Randall Buth in cooperation with the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. BSI is ideal for students who want to develop strong language skills along with introductions to the cultural and geographical backgrounds of the Bible. BSI immerses students into the language and ancient thought process, thereby, expanding their comprehension of the biblical world and its textual witnesses.

THE PROTOCOLS MANUSCRIPT has been removed from the exhibition in the new Library of Alexandria:

Egypt Library Removes Anti-Semitic Tract (The Guardian


Saturday December 6, 2003 10:01 PM

By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD

Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The Alexandria Library has withdrawn the first Arabic translation of the ``Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' from an exhibit after U.N. cultural officials questioned the display of the 19th century anti-Semitic tract.

In a statement faxed to The Associated Press on Saturday, library director Ismail Serageldin denied allegations that the book was displayed next to the Jewish holy book, the Torah.

[...]

Youssef Ziedan, who as director of the library manuscript center made the decision to display the book, noted the exhibition including the book was only open to researchers doing postgraduate studies.

``My professional view is that it is a silly book,'' he said. ``Its only significance is that it is the first Arabic edition of the book that has influenced the Arab mentality to a great extent.''

[...]

Given his Al-Usbu' interview, this sounds like furious backpedaling to me, but it will probably be let go.

I don't, incidentally, have any trouble with the idea of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being included in a Judaica exhibition, as long as it is clearly labeled as a notorious forgery and its real origins are explained. In that sense it is a work of historical importance (for the history of anti-Semitism) and education about its true nature would be useful.

Score another one for MEMRI.

MORE ON THE COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS: Stephen Carlson of Hypotyposeis comments on my latest post on the subject and adds some new information, mostly, quite properly, urging caution.

HERE'S A BOOK REVIEW IN HA'ARETZ (via Bible and Interpretation News):

Love and marriage in Talmudic times
By Hananel Mack

"Zahar unekeva bera'am [Male and Female He Created Them]" by Adiel Schremer, Shazar Center, 395 pages [In Hebrew (seems not to be listed in Amazon - JRD)]

For a number of years, the social aspects of history have attained a respected position in research on the medieval and modern periods. Historians of the ancient period, on the other hand, have yet to fully appreciate the value of the social component in the understanding of history, although the picture is gradually changing even in the historiography of ancient times.

I think this generalization is too pessimistic. Certainly there has been a great deal of interest in social scientific study of the Bible for decades, and not a little of such interest for Second Temple Judaism.

Adiel Schremer's book, which deals with Jewish marriage in the late Second Temple, Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, reflects this innovative trend and makes a major contribution to current research on ancient Jewish society, in which marriage occupied a pivotal position.

Although our knowledge of the institution of marriage is not derived from the Bible, the foundations of Jewish marital relations are based on biblical law and on the reality depicted in some of the books in the Bible. As in other fundamental issues, the classical rabbinical authorities (hazal in Hebrew) regarded the Bible, its laws and heroes and heroines, as the formal and ideational source of both Jewish law (halakha) regarding marriage and some of the less binding Jewish traditions on that subject.

Nonetheless, it is obvious that the marital arrangements practiced in the classic rabbinical age have only a limited connection with the Bible or with the reality depicted there. Family life is one of the most important and most sensitive issues in Jewish law and Jewish tradition, and marital relations were part of the extensive and detailed network of Jewish laws regarding the family. Any attempt to establish a direct link between the Bible and the laws promulgated by the classic rabbinical authorities and the way of life they prescribed in the area of marital relations would be in vain - just as vain, in fact, as the attempt to learn directly from the Bible the Jewish laws on the Sabbath and the festivals, kosher dietary rules, economic activity, prayer and other fundamental issues in Jewish law.

And, in fact, the Bible is absent from this book. Scan the book and you will quickly discover that the books of the Bible do not appear in the table of contents or in the bibliography. Similarly, you will find few references to the Bible in the text itself. In contrast, there are extensive discussions of many classical rabbinical works, as well as passages from the Apocrypha, the Qumran writings and early Christian literature.

The book is divided into 12 chapters (including an introduction discussing the research methodology used) and these chapters are devoted to various aspects of the subject. In most of the chapters, the author is careful to provide separate discussions of the reality and Jewish laws in the Holy Land and Babylon respectively. Such a discussion naturally requires a cautious handling of the sources that depict the two major centers of the Jewish world in the ancient period and which reflect the teachings of the rabbinical authorities in those two communities.

[... much more]

Another recent book on the same topic is by Michael L. Satlow: Jewish Marriage in Antiquity.

Susannah is an opera that is loosely based on the story of Susannah in the addition to the book of Daniel in the Apocrypha. The opera was written in 1955 and was performed in Knoxville Tennessee last month.

BOOK NOTE from Harold Bloom in the Guardian:

AD Nuttall's Dead from the Waist Down (Yale University Press) is a superbly witty, lively and illuminating study of three related figures, Isaac Casaubon, Mark Pattison and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Pattison served as Eliot's model for her unfortunate Casaubon, Dorothea Brooke's first husband. Pattison also wrote the best book on Isaac Casaubon, whose scholarship exposed the Hermetic Corpus as emanating from the second century of Alexandria in the Common Era, rather than from ancient Egypt. One can say that Nuttall charmingly reveals the spiritual impotence of many literary scholars today.

For the texts in question, see the Gnostic Society Library's Corpus Hermeticum web page. For brief background articles, see Wikipedia on Hermetica and Hermeticism. The best print translation is the one by Copenhaver listed in the former.

MORE ON THE PROTOCOLS EXHIBIT at the new Library of Alexandria:

UNESCO Plans to Denounce Anti-Jewish Text (The Guardian)


Friday December 5, 2003 11:16 PM

By FRANCES D'EMILIO

Associated Press Writer

ROME (AP) - The U.N. culture agency plans to denounce the so-called ``Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' amid reports that the text, long dismissed as a forgery to discredit Jews, was on display at a prominent Egyptian library.

UNESCO has asked Egypt's Alexandria Library about allegations that the book was displayed along with the Torah, or Jewish holy book, and that the library director allegedly made anti-Semitic comments.

[...]

UNESCO's director-general, Koichiro Matsuura planned to denounce the book this weekend at a seminar in Venice pegged to the 100th anniversary of the forgery. The seminar was organized in part by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles.

[...]

Good for them. And if the story is true, the director of the library should be fired.

MORE ON THE COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS: A reader refers me to the website of Michael van Rijn, which seems to be devoted to nefarious goings-on in the art world. He has published a book on the international art business called Hot Air, Cold Cash. The reader reports, "Michael van Rijn's website is weird in many ways but I've found it a good source of otherwise unavailable information." This link brings up all references in it to the Gospel of Judas and the dark deeds that surround it according to van Rijn. The list is in reverse chronological order. I can't vouch for any of it, but there you have it.

BIBLICA has a new issue online (84.4). Mark Goodacre notes the New Testament articles. There's also one pertaining to early Judaism:

Antje LABAHN - Ehud BEN ZVI, �Observations on Women in the Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1�9� , Vol. 84(2003) 457-478.

Abstract: These observations address the construction of women and their roles in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1�9. References to women in these chapters construed them as fulfilling a variety of roles in society, and characterized and identified them in various ways. To be sure, the genealogies reflected and reinforced the main construction of family and family roles in a traditional ancient near eastern society. But, numerous references in these genealogies indicated to the early (and predominantly male) readers of the book that ideologically construed gender expectations may and have been transgressed in the past and with good results. By implication, these references suggested to the readers that gender (and ethnic) boundaries can and even should be transgressed on occasion, with divine blessing, and resulting in divine blessing.

I HAD NOTICED LOOKSMART'S FIND ARTICLES and have kept meaning to mention it, but now Mark Goodacre has blogged on it and pointed to its Harvard Theological Review page and its Biblical Theology Bulletin page. I hadn't noticed the latter, which has a recent issue out. Two book reviews of interest:

Beatrice Bruteau (ed.), Jesus Through Jewish Eyes: Rabbis and Scholars Engage an Ancient Brother in a New Conversation
Reviewed by John F. Craghan

Roland Murphy, The Pontifical Biblical Commission, Jews, and the Bible
Reviewed by Amy-Jill Levine

The latter is actually a review of the PBC's book alongside Murphy's earlier review in Biblical Theology Bulletin. (Yesterday I found a summary of the PBC's book online, but now I can't find it again and I have other things to do.)

THE CHALDEAN CHURCH (whose liturgy is in Aramaic) has elected a new patriarch.

CECIL B. DEMILLE'S THE TEN COMMANDMENTS premiered eighty years ago this week. More here.

MORE ON MEL GIBSON'S CANCELING of the showing of his The Passion of Christ at the Vatican:

ROME, Italy (CNN) -- Mel Gibson has pulled "The Passion of Christ," depicting Jesus on screen, from a Vatican-sponsored film festival -- because his movie is not ready.

The unreleased, but controversial, movie about the final hours of the life of Jesus was scheduled to be shown Tuesday to a select group of Roman Catholic officials as part of the "Christ and the Cinema" festival.

But Gibson had "second thoughts" about some of the scenes and is re-editing the film, the movie's producer Nick Hill wrote in a letter to the organizer, Andrea Piersanti.

The former actor, who has written and is co-producing the film, said he would be happy to schedule a preview in the Vatican once the movie is finished, the letter added.

[...]

WILLEM-JAN DE WIT has placed the text of his (Dutch equivalent of a) Master's thesis at Utrecht University online:

Expectations and the Expected One: 4Q521 and the Light It Sheds on the New Testament

I don't have time to read it right now, but there you have it.

Via Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway blog.

MORE ON THE OTTAWA EXHIBITION from the Globe and Mail. Excerpt:

TORONTO � There's a tiny ivory pomegranate from Solomon's Temple, an engraved slab of stone that alludes to the biblical House of David, and three fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most important archeological discovery of the 20th century. All of these are among a stunning collection of more than 100 artifacts that go on display Friday at the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa.

The exhibition, developed by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in collaboration with Montreal's Museum of Archaeologiy and History, where it was shown earlier this year, covers a period of roughly 1,900 years, from the 12th century before the birth of Jesus to the seventh century AD. It's a span that includes seminal events of ancient Western civilization -- the destruction of the First Temple and the exile of the Jews to Babylonia, their subsequent return and the construction of the Second Temple, and the schisms in Judaism that ultimately gave rise to Christianity.

The Ottawa exhibition even contains scroll fragments that have not yet been displayed In Israel, including the so-called Isaiah B portion.

"THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION are more important than the Torah." So Dr. Yousef Ziedan, director of the new Library of Alexandria, on why he decided to add a copy of an Arabic translation of the former to a display including the latter. Excerpt of his comments from the MEMRI translation of the Al-Usbu' interview:

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.

"Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it� It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

Keep reading; it just gets weirder.

Thanks to Ellen Birnbaum for the reference.

UPDATE: David Nishimura has more at his blog Cronaca.